No. 29 by The Baffler

No. 29

JORDIN ISIP

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MARK S. FISHER

No. 29

The journal that blunts

the cutting edge

MARK S . FISHER

No. 29 EDIT OR IN CHIEF

John Summers

9 FOU N DING EDIT OR

Thomas Frank SEN IOR EDIT OR

Chris Lehmann

9 D E S IG N A N D A R T D I R E C T O R

The Flynstitute

9 M A N AG I N G E D I T O R

Lindsey Gilbert A S S O C I AT E E D I T O R

Dave Denison A S S I S TA N T E D I T O R

Lucie Elven P O E T RY E D I T O R

Edwin Frank R ESEA RCHER

Emily Carroll P R O D U C T I ON A S S I S TA N T

Joan Flynn

9 C ON T R I B U T I N G E D I T O R S

Barbara Ehrenreich, Susan Faludi, David Graeber, Evgeny Morozov, Rick Perlstein, Kim Stanley Robinson, George Scialabba, Jacob Silverman, Anna Summers, Astra Taylor, Catherine Tumber, Eugenia Williamson

9 C ON T R I B U T I N G A R T I S T S

Mark Dancey, Michael Duffy, Mark S. Fisher, Lisa Haney, Brad Holland, P. S. Mueller, Katherine Streeter

The journal that blunts the cutting edge

To certain orphans bobbing and weaving through Harvard Squaredom, enabling or assisting with this issue, we salute you, Cassandra de Alba, Diana Clarke, Dan Davies, Sean Janson, Liam Meyer, and Carolyn Oliver. In agreement with certain solemn contracts executed, we hereby acknowledge that the story on page 23 has been excerpted from All the Houses: A Novel by Karen Olsson, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. Copyright © 2015 by Karen Olsson. All rights reserved. Ditto for Ray Bradbury’s literary executor, who kindly approved our application for reprinting “Tomorrow’s Child,” but whose name we forget. The photos on pages 10 and 11 come courtesy of 18 Stafford Terrace, the Sambourne Family Home. Thanks, Sammy! The entries collected under “Daniel’s Dictionary” represent but a tiny portion of Daniel Aaron’s Commonplace Book, 1934–2012, published this summer by Pressed Wafer. Don’t wait to order a copy. Dan turned 103 in August. 9 PU BLISHER

Noah McCormack PR E SIDEN T

Valerie Cortés W E B D E V E L O PE R A N D C ON T E N T M A N AG E R

James White AU D I E N C E D E V E L O PM E N T A S S O C I AT E

Hannah Gais D E V E L O PM E N T A N D E V E N T S M A N AG E R

Eliza Fish FIXER

Zachary Davis

9 PA S T P U B L I S H E R S

The MIT Press, 2012–2014 Conor O’Neil, 2009–2011 Greg Lane, 1993–2007 FOU N DER S

No interns were used in the making of this Baffler.

Thomas Frank and Keith White

The Baffler, P.O. Box 390049, Cambridge, MA 02139 USA | 19 West 21st Street, Suite 1001, New York, NY 10010 USA

2 1 The Baffler [no. 29]

E x h i bit A 5 Brad Holland

The Baffler [no. 29] ! 3

C on t e n t s : The Baffler, no. 29 The Family Way

Jewels

Bedtime for Democracy

No Such Cuck

106

Grandfather of the Selfie

Punk Crock

110

A Not-So-Golden State

122

The Dialectic of Love and Authority

128

John Summers

Susan Zalkind

From the archive: Twenty-Nothing

Thomas Fr ank and Keith White

The Family That Preys Together Distressed Cut-Offs

Paterfamilias, Kaput

The morning angst Lucy Ellmann

Everybody knows Jacob Silver man

The Family Plot

The Children’s Hour

On the rule of the perpetual snot-nose K athleen Geier An all-too-sentimental education Kim Phillips-Fein

Clans of the Cathode

Turning off TV’s ersatz families Tom Carson

Memoirs of a Revolutionary’s Daughter Neda Semnani

Cradle to Grave

L.A.’s family-unfriendly family court Natasha Vargas-Cooper

66 82

The conservative jeer A mber A’Lee Frost Whistling eternal yesterday Eugenia Williamson The detective stories of Ross Macdonald Andrew Bacevich

Christopher Lasch on the family George Scialabba

Orphans Three Cheers for George Scialabba

134

Marching in Place

154

John Summers, Thomas Fr ank, Barbar a Ehrenreich, Nikil Saval, Rick Perlstein, Noam Chomsky, and George Scialabba

The politics of atonement Gene Seymour

Stories from All the Houses

The Third Son

K aren Olsson

Andrei Platonov

Monticello

148

Bitter River

170

Thomas Geoghegan

Mark Jacobs

4 1 The Baffler [no. 29]

The Family That Preys Together

Poems

Exhibitions

Yo Mama

Hard Objects

The Lighthouses

D: Fr ances Jetter

No Knowing

F: Martin Mayo

The Mantegna Oculus Rift

from Depths

Molly McQuade Yang Xiaobin Yang Xiaobin

Jennifer Nelson Jennifer Nelson Anna Griva

120

Something

147

The American Academy on Mars

169

David Ferry

Carter R atcliff

B: Naomi Vona C: Gr ace Fechner E: Carl Dunn G: R alph Steadman H: R andall Enos I: Dennis Nechvatal

188

Bafflomathy

Tomb of the Unknown Celebrity Carter R atcliff

3 13 42 65 77 91 127 153 187

A: Br ad Holland

In Loco Parentis 162

Literature at the B-school Merve Emre

Black Sheep Down Use It and Abuse It Corey Pein

184

Ancestors Tomorrow’s Child R ay Br adbury

BRAD HOLLAND

Better Management Through Belles Lettres

A mother brings her son to see a psychotherapist. After the session, the doctor comes out of the office looking grave. “Well doctor,” she asks him, “what’s wrong with him?” “Madam,” replies the Doctor, “I’m sorry to inform you that your son is suffering from the Oedipus complex.” “Oh Doctor, I’m so, so relieved,” she says. “Oedipus Shmoedipus—as long as he loves his mother.” The Baffler [no. 29] ! 5

Th e Fa m i ly Way

Bedtime for Democracy “ The earth belongs to the

living and not to the dead,” Thomas Jefferson said. And a lot of good that did. The founding father railed against economic royalists and their schemes to perpetuate wealth through inheritance, giving the dead hands of the past a leg up (so to speak) over the lowborn living. Mr. Jefferson probably wasn’t the first, and certainly wasn’t the last, to complain that inherited privileges of succession, if enshrined, would produce a dynastic pattern of rule over a permanent American underclass. And boy, was he right. Natty old Uncle Sam himself bows before the scions of today’s one percent—snot-noses, thumb-suckers, trust-fund bums, lucky sperm, and meddling ninnies that they are. Marrying within their own social class, romping through the same legacy schools, embracing the rites of chummy nepotism, and worst of all, being taken seriously (most egregiously, by themselves) as some sort of natural aristocracy, the economic royalists of our time have restored the family as the fulcrum of power. Once it was the Rockefellers and Fords, and other multigenerational cartels of the industrial state, name6 1 The Baffler [no. 29]

plating our institutions. (And remember how they filled their factories with immigrant workers looking to improve their station by shedding rather than hanging onto their Old World family surnames?) Now it’s the Kochs, the Murdochs, the Waltons, the Gateses, and the Kardashians—the mutant offspring of the twenty-first-century merger of entertainment, business, and politics—who magnify the American contradiction. Two of the contenders for next year’s presidential coronation are members of the same two families that, between them, have occupied the White House for twenty of the last twentyseven years. How nice—for them. It’s come to this: the perennial expectation that every generation of enterprising youth will transcend the horizon of the family, to achieve independence in rebellion against its authority, doesn’t ring true to our experience. We have highborn and we have lowborn, but no middle. The “grassroots” hero who goosed the GOP establishment, Donald Trump, was himself featherbedded to success by his rich father. That Trump made his recent splash by tapping into

the mottled veins of birthright politics, a discourse as old as the revolution itself, comes right on schedule.

When you poll these gran-

dees on the issues of the day, of course, they all favor good clean family living. As ritually intoned by the preachers, pundits, and politicians, the sanctity of the family idyll helps manage the inevitable frustrations that grow between the official model of success and the dread reality that your destiny depends more on your birth-class than on your achievements. As we discovered in begetting this issue, sitcoms from The Cosby Show and Married . . . with Children to The Simpsons and Modern Family have been obsoleted by more risible spectacles of disintegration. So we give you nervous teenage girl vloggers posting their “Morning Routines” to YouTube and Instagram. We give you the fallout from the hack of the pro-infidelity website Ashley Madison. And we give you the wantonly family-unfriendly punk rock of the 1970s, now mainstreamed onto the bulging laps of suburban papas.

What actually happens is that yuppie clans colonize our city playgrounds in

this issue’s many poems and stories, in translations from Greek, Russian, and Chinese, is a daughter’s memoir of her father’s 1983 execution in Iran. Her parents were in hiding when “the brothers”—the revolutionary guards of the Islamic regime—came and took him away.

And in the lighter-fare

The Great Mutation, 1942.

leisurely spells between ferrying junior and the young miss to test-prep class and piano lessons, while toddlers in certain Los Angeles neighborhoods die from violent abuse—unsaved by “concerned” squadrons of California’s “family preservation workers.” Domestic order is said to be the prerequisite for social change, rather than the other way around. Dysfunctional poor families have to put up with

pious social scientists from Harvard (we’re talking about you, Professor Putnam) telling them to get their houses in order. Protest leaders like the Nation of Islam’s Louis Farrakhan have said pretty much the same thing. Rich or poor, the family unit is pointed to as an incubator of personal responsibility and atonement. Not only in America, of course, does family-worship anchor conservatism. Among

department, we offer a more down-market patrimonial putsch. Close observers of the upcoming dynastic squareoff for the presidency have noticed the word “cuckservative” bandied about throughout the endless season of GOP presidential primaries and caucus debates. The “cuckservative” coinage, we learned, is an unholy blend of “conservative” with “cuckold,” intended to neutralize right-wing candidates believed to be lacking the cojones to stand up to the Man, or something like that. Demonstrating yet again the fatal incompatibility of conservatism with irony, “cuckservative” also derives from a Christian persecution complex rooted in the psychosexual racial perversions of the dwindling patriarchy. Yeah, that one surprised us, too.t —John Summers The Baffler [no. 29] ! 7

Th e Fa m i ly Way

Grandfather of the Selfie

M y great-great-greatgrandfather, Edward Linley Sambourne (1844–1910), known as “Sammy,” was the principal cartoonist for Punch. Sammy set up a studio at his home in Kensington, London, and photographed not only his servants and children, but also himself— thousands of times! “The Rhodes Colossus,” depicting British colonialist Cecil Rhodes with one foot in Cairo and the other in Cape Town, is his most iconic drawing. —Susan Zalkind

8 1 The Baffler [no. 29]

E.L. Sambourne striking the pose used to illustrate his drawing of “The Rhodes Colossus” for Punch, 1892.

PHOTOGR APHS COURTESY OF THE SAMBOURNE FAMILY HOME, ILLUSTR ATION COURTESY OF PUNCH

The Baffler [no. 29] ! 9

FROM THE ARCHIVE

| The Baffler no. 4 (1993)

Twenty-Nothing Even though the “twenty-something” debate

is transparently absurd and painfully shallow, we can’t simply reject “generational identity” as a totally meaningless category: there have of course been small circles of people from countless age groups that have shared worldviews in a general way. But it is senseless to expect to find meaningful common ideas held by everyone born between 1960 and 1970. And yet this is exactly what your prattling TV, your “news magazines,” attempt to do, since they’re interested in the clues to mass marketing rather than in the thoughts of real live people. It’s as though you think the doings of groups like the Young Hegelians were characteristic of the vast majority of their contemporaries, as though the “lost generation” had something to do with flagpole sitting, Amos ’n’ Andy, and the religious revivals of the American 1920s. And yet perhaps your confusion points directly to the most salient aspects of our thinking. We are a generation that is, at last, wise to your game. Our paramount aim is to resist, to negate the officious everyday assault of this botched civilization you have created. We don’t think about bright futures and business opportunities and the suburban spread that will someday be ours: our posture is a defensive one, as we build barriers between us and the incessant stream of lies and stupidity that is your public culture. We aim to carve out autonomous space, to somehow free ourselves from the daily drivel that drones from all sides. It’s a worldview that is necessarily incomprehensible to your standardized, mass-mediated ways of knowing. And you know none of this, because our discourse takes place not on audience-participation TV programs or in the hidebound pages of your glossy magazines, but in the small cenacles in college towns; the sub-movements 10 1 The Baffler [no. 29]

Our resistance is not a hairstyle or a Nirvana record or even a leather jacket with safety pins.

9 of punk rock that you’ll never hear about; the little magazines and independent record labels by the score that share nothing with the understanding of the world broadcast from everywhere by the official institutions of American speech. You would have to dig deep and listen carefully if you really wanted to know what we thought, but you’d rather hire somebody like the Red Hot Chili Peppers or River Phoenix to play the part for you, to tell you that it’s OK; that all the twentysomethings have come up with are a few stylistic innovations, a new sound and look that can be easily and fashionably imitated.

For each of us there came a point of revelation: a sudden, astonishing realization of the way your world worked, of the real purposes of your media, your politics, your academy. For many it came from rock music, from bands faithful to the spirit of 1977, from a hundred local scenes alive with enthusiasm and camaraderie and the promise of asylum. It was the sudden knowledge that the music—and by extension, the literature, the thoughts—that spoke most earnestly and honestly to our lives was virtually forbidden, barred from the record labels and airwaves choked with ’60s-style liberationist pap. Never again could we blithely file away the hours in your office complexes, listening dutifully to Madonna on the official radio. Never again could we read your newspapers uncritically, assuming their contents bore any relation to what went on in the world. Our entire gen-

MARTIN MAYO

erational compass was recalibrated instantly with one glimpse into the working of the machine: we were now outside, our tastes and thoughts automatically condemned by a smug alliance of hippies and businessmen. It is this experience you will never understand, nor will your cooptations, your manufactured replicas ever bring us back to the fold. Our resistance is not a hairstyle or a Nirvana record or even a leather jacket with safety pins. You have created in us an implacable enemy of the worst kind: a foe who understands how your cultural machinery works and whom you are not physically capable of retrieving.

You wonder about the nature of the “twenty-

somethings”: here’s your answer. We are TWENTY-NOTHING, forever lost to your suburban platitudes; lost to the simple blather of your TV; deaf to your non-politics; hopelessly estranged from your cult of “professionalism,” the brain-deadening architecture of your office complexes. Although your anointed authorities may

not take it into account when they do their “studies” of the young, there is a vast cultural resistance underway. Your best and brightest want nothing to do with you. This is a generation that will never again cooperate, will never make your coffee with equanimity or discuss happily the latest doings of your favorite sitcom characters. Thus we proclaim your American Century at an end, with a shrug of distaste rather than the bang you had counted on. We are a generation that finally says NO to your favorite institutions: not only will we not fight for oil, but we don’t believe anything that you broadcast, we avoid your malls, we don’t care about the free play of signifiers on your cable TV. And you can never be rid of us. The Baffler will not win this dispute by itself. You will believe what you choose to believe, and you will go on using your telephone surveys and your public-opinion polls to rationalize it. But then again, we don’t care. We know who we are, no matter what labels you choose for us. Now leave us alone.t —Thomas Frank and Keith White The Baffler [no. 29] ! 11

Yo Mama 3 Molly McQuade She loves him, because he cannot be eaten. Then, she tries. Half dead, he resists. His late flinch entreats her. Pale little legs, that pod, a few hairs, almost no eyesâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; this least is what she craves yet cannot have. Keep me, he asks. She bounces him from paw to paw, slaps, and sighs. If he were still alive, she would love him and kill him. For Ethan Leinwand.

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E x h i bit B 5 Naomi Vona

Nuclear Family. The Baffler [no. 29] ! 13

Th e Fa m i ly That Pre ys Toget h er

JORDIN ISIP

14 1 The Baffler [no. 29]

Distressed Cut-Offs The morning angst 3 Lucy Ellmann

How convenient for capitalism that the self

morphed so easily into the cellphone. The doomed and dying use selfie sticks to record their every car accident and shark encounter. But the web is also awash with cheery self-promotion, from glossy offerings like Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee ( Jerry Seinfeld interviewing fellow comedians and advertising cars on the side) and Freunde von Freunden (where arty Europeans show off, in text and photos, their carefully curated homes, offices, and dogs) to many other types of bragging: terrorist training camp highlights; photographic compilations of thimbles, thumbtacks, antique weaponry, or corkscrews; glitzy performances of culinary tasks; more or less frank discussions of periods and tampons; and goofy videos of boys trying on bras. The web is for lonely, needy, greedy show-offs and obsessives, and the people who love them. Those most enamored with the technology of self-absorption are also the most self-conscious (and most unhappy) people on the planet: teenage girls. These people live in terror of the society in which they find themselves, and their main aim is to reach adulthood without being raped, shot, manhandled, or murdered. Their self-protective strategies take some odd forms, and they have now carved out for themselves a whole safe, insular online world in which they record their sheltered existences and get examined, adored, and minutely “hated” by other girls, whom the video girls welcome (in the virtual sense only) into their bedrooms. This is the barefaced, bug-eyed, belief-beggaring, bullshitting self—if not exactly a work of art, at least a work of nascent commerce.

Product placement is the sinister inspiration behind much of what these girls inflict on themselves and one another. They seem to want to be your pal, but it’s really the attention of multimillion-dollar companies they crave. Starbucks looms large. Even half-drunk frappuccinos from yesterday are still worth tenderly videoing on their bedside tables. Among the humbler categories of the girlie video world is the shopping “haul,” in which the girl sits chummily on the floor of her bedroom, displaying bags of clothing and her encyclopedic knowledge of everything on offer at chain stores, while emphasizing that all the stuff she bought is cute, awesome, and really cheap. Everything, according to teenyboppers, is superduper cute. In a baking video, two cute girls make cute cupcakes out of cute ice-cream cones—but how mercilessly would they mock any girl who thought of eating one. Bulimia’s cute too. Men should be forced to watch this stuff, to see what they’ve done to women.

Hairdos on Demand The makeup tutorials feature deceptively amateurish product shots, with shaky close-ups of every lip gloss, shampoo, perfume, and ittybitty container of wrinkle cream. They can seem endless, with the juvenile “tutor” spending twenty minutes at a time basting her face six ways from Thanksgiving. Ever forget to brush your hair, or apply lipstick, deodorant, nail polish, jewelry? These girls don’t, and by example they encourage other girls to spend hours of their lives every day on self-conscious self-abasement of the same kind. They even The Baffler [no. 29] ! 15

Th e Fa m i ly That Pre ys Toget h er pretend this is fun: they’re always smiling while they administer the gunk. They have a real ball trying to hide their acne. Then there are the sisterly talks, in which we’re told that friendship is a two-way thing, unhappiness a waste of time, water necessary, and that bees yeah! make the world keep going. In cloyingly solipsistic Q & A sessions, the apparently fascinating fun-ette answers questions about herself from viewers, such as, What’s your favorite item of makeup; your OOTD (outfit of the day); the craziest thing you ever did? In “Mom Tags,” the mother is interrogated about the craziest thing the girl ever did. There are also whole videos of hairdos, created in response, supposedly, to viewer demand. Or, now and then, you get a ten-minute video on “What’s in My Purse”: the depressing contents of a purse (let’s face it, the contents of purses are generally depressing, because there’s rarely enough money in there) are dumped on the floor so that our hostess can mull over, and explain, yeah! the mind-numbing purpose of each object. I wish they’d dump out what’s in their wastepaper baskets instead: come on, let’s see the roaches, needles, and prophylactics. But drugs and sex have nothing to do with this particular web niche. These are rich, pretty, and artfully self-censoring princesses, showing off their regalia. The most curious thing about these displays is how alone the girl is. Despite the vague and occasional evidence of moms, it seems more likely that the girl was incubated and hatched in her bedroom by remote control, with no connection to the outside world at all. The bedroom is surprisingly neat, the walls white or lilac, with the emphasis on the bed, her pedestal. She’s surrounded by scented candles and electronic devices. As the girl studies herself, all available screens—the TV, the laptop, the smartphone, and the “meer” (or mirror)—become interchangeable. The house is brand-new, ostentatious, and ferociously hygienic, with a comically well-stocked fridge, 16 1 The Baffler [no. 29]

and the girl seems to be in sole command of this empire (an adolescent’s dream come true). Not much sign of parents or siblings, and certainly not of the retinue of servants that must keep the whole shebang afloat. Outside sits a BMW she claims is hers. But what does she need a car for? Many of these self-chronicling shut-ins are homeschooled and hardly go anywhere. Their idea of going out is to sit on the balcony, where they complain that people in the outside world make noise. This interferes with the video project, forcing them to retreat indoors. Little Kaspar Hausers, their only abiding interest is in looking, sounding, and yeah! acting cool, so as to receive “thumbs up”s on their vlogs. They are dolls come to life: they move their limbs, chatter, and change their clothes a lot, their bodies smooth, their skin (almost) blemish free. Other lonely, less affluent girls are allowed to benefit from this shamanic conformism. They can learn, for instance, how to carry on a ditzy blow-by-blow monologue while applying the daily dolly mask that ensures they will prematurely age and require multitudinous cosmetic purchases for life. Vita brevis, Noxzema longa.

Amazeballs and Awesome (or: What a Beautifying Morning?) These girls have all mastered the Valley Girl accent and manner, even if their valleys lie in Minnesota or Pennsylvania. Or maybe Transylvania. Their forced cool is completely standardized. It’s always Christmas in July for them. But distress abounds, and not just in their high-waisted denim cut-offs. Most of these young women are sinisterly manipulated, fearful, and cranky—however serene their foreheads may be—and they market to fellow sad sacks an intimidating set of criteria for being acceptable. They’re like all the girls you hated at school, and their pretense of happiness is one of the most exasperating things about them. They should all be out saving

K ATH E R I N E S TR E E TE R

The Baffler [no. 29] ! 17

Th e Fa m i ly That Pre ys Toget h er whales, planting trees, building railroads, dismantling Guantanamo, or just reading a real book. Instead, they’re half-listening to audiobooks of recent Hollywood offerings and staring at themselves in the meer. They pretend to be cosmopolitan and “crazy busy”: they always have to “grab” a coffee, a bottle of water, their boots, or their car keys before they’re “good to go.” But they have fenced themselves off from our collective impending implosion and yeah! banished any hint of it from their speech, their looks, their demeanors, and their boudoirs. They live in envelopes of arid nonchalance. They have no time for negativity (negative vloggers are hard to find—they must have all been burnt at the stake), and the prissiness is beyond belief. One of the strictest formulae these young women have created is the “Morning Routine” video, which issues from their YouTube “channel” (they dwell on this word: they may believe they own whole TV networks). The Morning Routine sometimes begins with an intro, in which the kid flings her arms around a lot and wags her head from side to side in a sphinxy way to make sure you know she’s cute, alarmingly so. Now the routine blasts off. The convention is that she’s asleep in bed. Her cellphone buzzes, she drowsily silences it, and then proceeds to spend a good amount of time lying in various poses on the bed texting people and yeah! checking social media. A memo of the midteen midriff. Sometimes a purse-dog or bunny rabbit joins her to be cuddled (bunnies are big in this world, though the bunny itself must be small). Then, abruptly forgetting all about her squiffy pet, the girl stumbles into her private bathroom. No one excretes in this fantasyland. Instead, at the sight of a new meer, she starts dancing excitedly to her favorite music. Soon she’s trotting, still in her cutesome pj’s, through the echoing mansion to the fridge, which handily houses a camera so that we can see her yeah! exact facial expression as she 18 1 The Baffler [no. 29]

opens the fridge door. She embarks on a breakfast—yogurt, granola, fruit, and coffee—that hints at constipation (see above). Then we’re back upstairs to watch the exhaustive makeup routine. It’s the worst sleepover you ever attended. To liven things up a bit, she may take a shower, since she has at least four soapy liquid products to delightedly present. In the shower, Morning Routine girls wear bikinis. This is never explained. Perhaps, like certain nuns of old, the girls have been ordered never to look upon their own naked bodies, for fear of some unfortunate Edenish awakening that might lead to the collapse of this purdahed pubescence in which everything’s cute except boys. For every Humbert Humbert who may be watching Morning Routine videos to see budding starlets in bikinis or in bed, there are at least a dozen female contemporaries avidly soaking up the atmos, thrilled to be spoken to nicely by anyone, even a complete stranger or a complete idiot. Artificiality is a given: despite the pretense of intimacy, truthfulness, and autonomy, most of these video artists obviously have a lot of technical help. The more energetic the camera angles, the more ruthless the editing, the more vivid the lighting, the more maniacal the colors, the more hotel-like the domicile, and the more joyful (and savage) the dermabrasion, the happier the sponsors. You should see all the jars of brushes and eyebrow pencils, the array of eye shadows and eye shadow concealers, the eyeliners and eyelash curlers and earlobe accentuators, the lipsticks, the lip exfoliators, the lip-zippers, the cold cream, the foundation, the ointments, the unguents, the mists and sprays and monsoon mud packs, the scissors, the tweezers, the sponges and cotton balls and foam pads and pad foams, and yeah! the amazeballs hair-curling and hair-straightening and hair-knuckle-under machines. It’s enough for the army of makeup artists on a Busby Berkeley picture. The shelving alone deserves an Oscar, with many

little totalitarian drawers of very well-organized stuff. With such pigments and priorities, these adolescents could be painting the Sistine Chapel! But Morning Routine art is ephemeral, and all wiped away twelve hours later by the Nighttime Routine.

The Hall of Meers There’s a confessional element to the beforeand-after cosmetic transformations: these girls are admitting to their viewers that channeling Barbie takes work. To show they’re human, they may even venture into a little irony (of the easy Friends variety), presenting some stagey awkwardness or a little self-parody in the requisite blooper reel at the end. Otherwise, they’re continuously upbeat—since unhappiness is such a waste of time. They are product placement cheerleaders, with blusher brushes as their pompoms, the purse-pup as mascot, and the bedroom a field of dreams. Some of these walking advertisements are under sixteen, though, and therefore child laborers. They’re exploited, and they in turn exploit, varnishing their sponsorships, hoodwinking their public, and luring the unwary toward their deranged music videos, which they also want to sell. So, yeah! these homemade stars lead freedomless, eventless, nourishmentless, and odorless lives—apart from all the fumes from the promotional perfume and toner with which they hourly douse themselves. Though vulnerable to “thumbs down”s across the globe on account of their asses (fat) and eyebrows (thick), their resolutely pally personas are perfect avatars of capitalism. The phenomenon isn’t new. As Shirley Jackson put it in the 1950s: From the time my daughter gets up in the morning to brush her hair the same number of times that Carole up the street is brushing her hair to the time she turns off her radio at night after listening to the same program that Cheryl three blocks away is listening to, her

life is controlled, possessed, by a shifting set of laws. . . . The side of the street she walks on, the shoes she wears to walk on it, the socks, the skirt, the pocketbook . . . even the jacket and the haircut are rigidly prescribed.

But baby-boom popularity-seekers were spared the extra barbed wire of social media. Will our pampered slave-girls break free? Their current YouTube, Instagram, Keek, and Vine experiments could turn into real girl power—if these ostriches could only find time for it, between the waxing and the waning of their beauty regimens. A little light activism might brighten the bleak days of their dotage, for surely they can’t remain apolitical narcissists forever, documenting their own disintegration.t

Da n i e l’s D ic t ion a r y

[A]

Acersecomick • One whose hair was never cut. —Daniel Aaron

STUART GOLDENBERG

The Baffler [no. 29] ! 19